FAQ

It's painful to watch competent actors slumming in
this movie. You know they are reaching for
something "cool" and knowing, when what they
ultimately grab at is something infantile and
delusional. This is probably the writer James
Still's point: that these people need to look death
in the face and grow up. But it's such a mundane
point.

If death is all around you, if the people you know
are dropping like flies, and you figure the remedy
is to get along with the people who are left
(because they may be gone tomorrow) and have
children of your own (so you feel death has not
defeated you), why stay among people whose habits
issue in death? Why impose the specter of sexual
caution and responsibility, when what makes the
people in this movie who they are flies in the face
of this appeal? I don't think the main characters
Valentino, Mary Carmen, and Gary form a bisexual
triangle, because they want to lead wary,
conventional lives. The thought presented here that
bisexuality can be the common ground on which
homosexuals and heterosexuals can come together is
sly pontificating, and when you consider the way the
camera languishes over the liplock Vincent D'Onofrio
is made to plant on Thomas Jane, you get the feeling
that the heterosexual side is taking a back seat to the flip side of the
triangle.

This really seems like Gary's story anyway; Selma
Hayek is trying much too hard to garner some respect and dignity for Mary
Carmen for it to be hers.
Director Dan Ireland should have pulled her in more; it might have done
wonders for her big moment, when
she lip-syncs to Diana Ross' "Ain't No Mountain High Enough." It's
supposed
to suggest the strength of
her attachment to her lover, but Hayek hasn't been
asked to play it deeply. She declaims everything,
so what she emotes spreads out too thinly.

It's Thomas Jane's reticence that convinces us of
whom the story favors. When his body surrenders to
Valentino on the dance floor, or his eyes roll back
with Valentino's teeth in his neck, or he broods
quietly when Valentino and Mary Carmen are sharing
intimacies, the sexual undercurrent he creates pulls you under with great
impetus. This must be what
Still means by Gary's velocity. At least that is
what I figure. But if I happen to be wrong, what in blazes does that
pretentious title mean?

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